Ready at Dawn is “Not Going to Comment” on The Order: 1886 Game Length

February 16, 2015
Written by Jason Dunning

On Saturday, user PlayMeThrough uploaded an entire playthrough of The Order: 1886 to YouTube, with the total of all videos added together placing the length of The Order at around 5.5 hours.

Speaking to Eurogamer last week before this particular playthrough went live, Ready at Dawn CEO Ru Weerasuriya responded to previous claims about the game’s length that suggested it might be only a few hours long:

I know there are numbers out there. I know why the question comes up. I know numbers have been put out there that are actually not right. It’s impossible to finish the game in that time, so we know the numbers are wrong.

At the end of the day, we’re not going to comment on it. We can’t stop people from writing the things they do. And we’re not going to jump at every single mistake that is made out there. Every time somebody has the wrong impression of something we made, or somebody writes the wrong thing about what we did, it would be a full-time job to be like, oh no, that’s not right. We make games. We do what we do for the players. And, ultimately, that’s where I want to leave it.

Weerasuriya declined to comment on the average playthrough time for testers. Instead, he added how “game length is important” and “every game has to take its own time to tell its story.”

When it comes to consumer concern over The Order: 1886 being a full-priced title, yet is a single-player only game with a potentially short campaign, Ru says he “absolutely” understands that, and it was something they always kept in their heads.

After looking back at the industry ten years ago, where single-player games were more common, he talked about the diversity in the games industry:

Do we all need to do the same thing? I hope people who do like these kind of games, do play them. But I also want to be in an industry where me as a gamer, I’m given the choice to do that. I’ve played games that lasted two hours that were better than games that I played for 16 hours. That’s the reality of it.

I’ve had many more experiences of very short games that have floored me, that have left me dreaming of the things I could do after, more than the games that have lasted 15, 16, 20 or 30 hours, where I’ve just been like, okay, I played it through and I got what I wanted, but I didn’t get more than what I was expecting. Sometimes I want to be floored, even if it’s for a short amount of time.

He finished up that thought by saying, “Gameplay length for me is so relative to quality. It’s just like a movie. Just because a movie is three hours long, it doesn’t make it better.”

Also last week, Ready at Dawn CTO Andrea Pessino went on Twitter to say, “Note: I am done commenting on clickbait rumors about game length, “downgrade” idiocy and such nonsense. Don’t bother asking.”

You’ll be able to experience The Order: 1886 for yourself when it launches in North America and Europe this Friday, February 20.